My life consists of more ghosts than living people.
Or maybe I'm the ghost, wandering the corridors of everyone else's lives, occasionally rattling a picture frame here, or creaking a floorboard in the middle of the night there. I like to think I'd be a welcome haunt; "Honey, that ghost was rattling around last night, but he left a huge bowl of this delicious spicy roasted garlic guacamole, so I guess I'm okay with it." At minimum, they wouldn't call an exorcist.
I pass people on the street, and they're little more than walking anxiety attacks in a suit and tie. I've seen people who I would have sworn had perfect lives, now on the brink of suicide after the past four years, divorced, broke, bitter. Maybe it's my childhood as a street thief, I've had everything in my life ripped away from me a dozen times or more, so I'm used to war footing in hard times. You can see some of these people have never dealt with anything much more gravid than an outbreak of acne up until now.
I never know if that makes me better equipped to deal with a crisis like this, or simply broken in a way that allows me to survive it. I like to think the former, but I've fooled myself into believing deceptions before, so I have more than a little trepidation about it. I try to deny myself any illusions about life, and sometimes that bleeds over into denying others theirs as well.
I wonder at the growing movement towards pseudo science in America, and I fear it. I've had to distance myself from people I love, because I can't tolerate willful ignorance. Sometimes, I'll see a post from someone I would have thought to be an otherwise rational human being, and they'll say something about Hillary Clinton's secret pizza restaurant child trafficking thing, or how Covid-19 is a liberal/democratic hoax, and I'll think; "Oh, no...not YOU too?!?"
As people become more desensitized to what is now everyday shock/atrocity/outrage, it's like our societal serotonin has been depleted without an recovery. We've become detached from reality in a way that sedates us, and after four years of un-abbreviated outrage, we're going through (as Jim Wright recently so well put it), societal PTSD.
It's both staggering and disheartening for me to witness this phenomenon in the martial arts realm. In this macho, truth-in-blood demanding "if it doesn't work in the ring, it won't work in the street" group of dick-swinging chimpanzees in starched, white pajamas, the number of whom will simultaneously demand proven-to-the-ground evidence that a technique will work under real time combat pressure, yet casually dismiss the dangers of not wearing a mask because, "this guy on youtube said snorting chlorine off a hooker's ass cures it", makes my brain attempt repeated efforts to chew its way free of my skull.
(For this reason alone, I usually can't tolerate the company of other martial artists - with a select few exceptions who have other interests outside of homicidal bursts of stabbing.)
Vox Populi insists that all the signs were there, but that's only what H.L. Mencken called "The great condescension of hindsight" - no one could have predicted this. Nostradamus would be having the field day that the Mormon prophets seem to have missed. I had prepared to be unemployed for a year, because I was starting a new career - when the lockdown hit, I was relatively safe, many of my peers and friends, particularly those in the martial arts were caught completely flat-footed.
Lots of people suffering right now, and I don't know anyone personally who isn't affected, either directly or indirectly. Quite a few have lost relatives and close friends. I, myself, have also. The most refreshing thing I've heard lately was from President Biden, but it was grim as well; "It will get worse before it gets better". The truth has had such a rare appearance in the past years, I almost didn't recognize it.
But I believe him.
This disease, like the wave of conspiracy madness, shock, outrage and the plethora of daily scandals has the momentum of a tsunami, and it won't simply die down as easily as it revved up. There are so many who will never see another 'normal' day in their lives, the closest they'll come to it is a night without Fox news, or enough food to eat that their children don't go to sleep hungry.
Understand this, there are *millions* who will die believing the election was stolen, or Blacks/Jews/Atheists are going to overtake and enslave White America, China engineered the coronavirus, or that Atheists actually eat children...or all of the above, and worse, yet. You absolutely will not convince them of anything different, they cling to these illusions like a new convert to religion, tears of joy streaming down their faces as they experience the euphoria of finally having someone to blame. It's BLM. It's Liberals. It's Democrats. It's these goddamn Muslims/Mexicans/Immigrants/Abortion Doctors/Vaccines.
It's anyone but themselves.
I have lost faith that most of these people are "reachable". They cling to these beliefs because, like a tattered stuffed animal, it helps them sleep better when the lights go off. In a way, I can't really begrudge them that...if they reached this age and suddenly the world flipped on them, they're just now learning the lessons I had forced on me when I was 10. And you know what they say about old dogs, and new tricks. The best thing they can do for society in general is die quietly, and take their insanity with them.
And when this is finally balanced, as all things eventually are, the toll will be more catastrophic than we suspected it would.
And there'll be a lot more ghosts to keep me company.
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